Big hits and big innings

Baseball’s first full weeks have turned into a nightly home run reel, with Arizona, Pittsburgh and St. Louis all piling up eye-catching swings by April 13. (mlb.com) (espn.com) Ketel Marte opened Arizona’s April 13 game at Baltimore by driving a leadoff homer 443 feet at 108.6 miles per hour off the bat. The Diamondbacks still lost 9-7 after the Orioles scored six runs in the eighth inning. (mlb.com 1) (mlb.com 2) (mlb.com 3) Marte had also led off Arizona’s April 11 game at Philadelphia with a homer, a 406-foot shot on the third pitch of the night. Arizona won that game 8-7, then got two more Marte homers in the April 13 loss to Baltimore. (mlb.com 1) (mlb.com 2) Pittsburgh supplied the biggest inning of the stretch on April 12, when the Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs 16-5. Brandon Lowe hit a second-inning grand slam and a later solo homer in that game, giving him three home runs across two games. (mlb.com 1) (mlb.com 2) (mlb.com 3) The Pirates followed that outburst by beating the Cubs 9-3 in 11 innings on April 13. Pittsburgh’s lineup had 16 runs one day and nine more the next, pushing the club to a 9-6 record. (mlb.com) (mlb.com) St. Louis got its latest jolt from Jordan Walker, who hit his eighth home run on April 13 against Cleveland. The homer gave Walker the Major League Baseball lead and made him the fifth Cardinals player to reach eight homers in the club’s first 16 games. (espn.com) (fox2now.com) The names around Walker on that Cardinals list are Stan Musial in 1954, Mark McGwire in 1998, Scott Rolen in 2004 and Albert Pujols in 2006. St. Louis lost 9-3 to Cleveland, but Walker’s start has put him in rare company before mid-April. (wtop.com) (fox2now.com) The early schedule is small enough that one swing can reshape a leaderboard, and that is already happening. By April 14, Marte had multiple leadoff-homer highlights, Lowe had powered Pittsburgh’s weekend surge, and Walker had climbed to the top of the home run race. (mlb.com) (mlb.com) (espn.com)